Creators (5 page)

However, the Reeve gets his revenge when it comes to telling
his tale by making the butt a Miller. This unfortunate man is humbugged not by one student but by two, who seduce his wife and his daughter and ensure that he gets a biff on the boko as well. The interest of his tale, for us, is that it deals in dialect: in fact it has been called “the first dialect story.”
¹⁹
People in Chaucer’s day were already very conscious of regional speech—Chaucer himself says in
Troilus
“there is so great diversite in Englissh and in writing of oure tonge”—and he repeatedly draws attention to the antagonisms of accents. The Parson, who objects strongly to northern alliterative styles in verse, replies, when the Host asks him for a tale:

Chaucer evidently wanted his poetry to circulate widely north of the Trent. He does not engage in alliteration in the northern manner, but he makes his two triumphant students obvious northerners, not only by stressing their different pronunciation, using
a
or
aa
where Southerners would use
o
and
oo
, but demonstrating differences in word endings and grammar. Thus for the third person singular of the present tense, the students use an
s
ending, whereas their southern antagonist, the Reeve, uses the
th
ending. Indeed Chaucer’s ingenious and consistent use of dialect in this story is beautifully done and, I suspect, was noted by many of his literary successors who wanted to use this device to enliven their own dialogue, notably Shakespeare in both parts of his
Henry IV
and in
Henry V
.

The relish with which Chaucer relates tales of low life shows his enormous appetite for comedy and his association, which was to become a staple of English literature from his day till the mid-twentieth century, of buffoonery with the lower classes. He was indeed the first to establish this convention, and he established it in such a masterful fashion that it endured over half a millennium. But bawdry is only a part of his repertoire—his aim is comprehensiveness and a variety of modes. He was the first English poet to deal in a lethal combination of satire, irony, and sarcasm. It
emerges strongly in
The Pardoner’s Tale
. The Pardoner, a seller of indulgences, is a complete and shameless rogue; but Chaucer, not content with exposing his impudence, shows how good he was at his job and how powerfully he preached against sinfulness. The Pardoner had also been taught to use the figure of Death to scare his hearers. But at this point, as often happens with the greatest writers, the creative spirit takes over and Chaucer suddenly produces a passage of intense pathos about an old man who wants to die and cannot. The drunken rioters of the story set out to find and slay Death and, by an ironic twist, meet someone equally anxious to meet Death but for quite different reasons. The passage is great poetry, and worth quoting in full:

This image of the old man knocking on mother earth to be let in is typical of Chaucer’s immense power to conjure up visions that tear the heart. Chaucer is a man of all moods and occasions, and
not only creates settings but creates the actual vocabulary in which he expresses them. His impact on our language has never been excelled, even by Shakespeare. All his creative life he was looking for words or creating new ones. He had a vocabulary of 8,000 words, twice as many as his contemporary John Gower, and many more times than that of most literates of his age. About half his words are Germanic, half of Romance origin: he ransacked common speech for short Anglo-Saxon words, and French and Italian for more flowery ones. It is true that Shakespeare had three times as many (about 24,000), but Shakespeare was an inheritor of Chaucer’s word bank, as well as a massive depositor in his own right. Chaucer saw French and Italian poetry not so much as models to imitate but as verbal shop windows from which he could steal words that as yet had no English equivalents. He thus added over 1,000 words to our language—that is, these words cannot be found in earlier writers.
²¹
They included these: jubilee, administration, secret, voluptuousness, novelty, digestion, persuasion, erect, moisture, galaxy, philosophical, policy, tranquillity. These are mostly polysyllabic, weighty words, used by scholars and professional men. Chaucer balances these additions by taking from the common stock of ordinary speech thousands of others and putting them into the written language for the first time. Moreover, he uses these words not only to give directness and vivacity to his verse but to ornament and silver it by producing brilliant figures and similes, often alliterative, and always neat and vivid. We do not know how many of these figures he invented or which were sayings in the London and Kentish vernacular he favored. All we know is that they first made their appearance in his work. And they are still current. Among the alliterations are “friend and foe,” “horse and hounds,” “busy as bees,” “fish and flesh,” “soft as silk,” “rose-red,” “gray as glass,” and “still as a stone.” We do not still say “jangled as a jay”; but we say “snow-white,” “dance and sing,” “bright and clear,” “deep and wide,” “more or less,” “old and young,” “hard as iron.” “No doubt” and “out of doubt” are Chaucerisms. So are “as the old books say” and “I dare say.” Chaucer also had a neat way of working proverbs, sayings, and popular witticisms and comparisons into his verses. Thus in
The Friar’s Tale
we come across the Earl, “who
spak one thing but he thoughte another,” and in
The Knight’s Tale
there is “The smylere with the knyf under the cloke.” In
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
we are told “Modre will out, that see we day by day,” and in
The Reeve’s Tale
there is “So was hir joly whistle wel y wet.” It is Chaucer who first warns us, “It is nought good a sleeping hound to wake” and who writes of setting “the world on six and sevene.”
²²

Chaucer’s coinage was words—old, new, borrowings, inventions, transformations—but his game was life. He has an affinity with all living things, and brings them before our eyes with astonishing skill. Here (in
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
) is the cock:

And here is the household tom:

But it is humans who rouse Chaucer’s creative powers to the highest pitch. In a sense he loves them all so long as he can show them in action to delight his readers. It has been well observed that
The Canterbury Tales
is an allegory of the human race. Chaucer (like Shakespeare) takes people as they come and, as
Dryden says, in presenting them, “he is a perpetual fountain of good sense.” What is more, like Shakespeare, Chaucer wants people, wherever possible, to speak for themselves. It is startling, and quite unprecedented, what a large proportion of the
Tales
is in direct speech. Indeed much is in dialogue. Thus the Friar speaks of a sermon he has just given:

Chaucer’s dialogue is so crisp and lively, so easy to say, and so apposite in the way it advances the tale—and he prefers it, so often and advantageously, to straight narrative—that I have often thought how competent and professional he would have been as a dramatist. There was no stage in his day, more’s the pity. Otherwise he might have astonished us all with his plays. We have here, then, a proto-Elizabethan, denied a role of roles for want of a theater. All the same, he is beyond doubt the great creative voice of medieval England, bringing it to us in all its fun and pity, laughter and tears, high spirits and low jests. Dramatist he may not be, but he is the showman beyond compare.

A
LBRECHT
D
ÜRER
(
1471–1528
)
was among the most creative individuals in history. As soon as he could hold a pen, he was drawing. A drawing of himself, done when he was thirteen, survives, showing him with long, silky hair and wearing a tasseled cap, pointing earnestly to his image in a mirror. It survives because his father loved it and kept it, and it is not only brilliant but highly accomplished: evidently the boy had been drawing for many years, probably from the age of three, which is when most natural artists begin.
¹
It is hard to believe that he let a single day of his life pass without creating something, even when he was traveling—for Dürer discovered (as I have) that watercolors are perfect for a traveling artist, light to carry, easy to set up, and ideally suited for a quick landscape or townscape sketched while there is half an hour to spare. His topographical watercolors were the first landscapes done by a northern European and the first use of watercolor outside England; and considering the novelty of the topic and the medium they are extraordinarily accomplished.
²

Dürer’s initiation in adopting the new medium—watercolor—so that he could record his travels and never waste a day was characteristic both of his intense, unremitting industry and of his voracious appetite for new artistic experiences. His output included 346 woodcuts and 105 engravings, most of great elabo
ration; scores of portraits in various media; several massive altarpieces; etchings and drypoints; and 970 surviving drawings (of many thousands).
³
Virtually all his work is of the highest possible quality, and he seems to have worked at the limit of his capabilities all his life. Indeed he was always pushing the frontiers of art forward, and the number of firsts he scored in technical innovation is itself striking. The Leonardo of northern Europe (but with much more pertinacity and concentration), Dürer had a scientific spirit that compelled him to ask why as well as do, and to seek means of doing better all the time by incessant questing and searching.

We see Dürer as a great individualist, and that is right. He virtually invented the self-portrait, not because he was an egoist but because starting a sketch of himself filled in odd moments before he began a new task (a habit of painters who cannot bear to be idle for even a few minutes). Such sketches, once begun, tend to acquire an artistic momentum of their own and develop into full-scale elaborate oil paintings—as happened to Dürer several times, so that we are more familiar with his physique and appearance than with those of any other artist before Rembrandt. He also drew his family, as an extension of his individuality: there survive several masterly portraits of his father; a touching portrait of his young bride, Agnes; and a charcoal drawing of his aged mother, who had borne eighteen children, fifteen of whom died before reaching adulthood. This drawing of his mother combines total realism (“never omit a line or a wrinkle in a portrait” was one of Dürer’s obiter dicta) with affectionate respect. Then, to combat forgery, Dürer was the first to devise his own logo, AD—and a most distinctive one it is, the best of any painter’s. This too adds to his individuality. Dürer lived in a period when German artists, following the Italian practice, were beginning to move rapidly from medieval anonymity to Renaissance personality. This applies particularly to the four great German artists who were his contemporaries—Matthias Grünewald, one year older; Lucas Cranach the Elder, one year younger; and Albert Altdorfer and Hans Holbein the Younger, both born in the early 1490s. These wonderfully gifted and purposeful men carried German art to a high pitch of creative power which had been inconceivable until then, and which (it has to be said) German artists
have never since come even close to equaling. All five were intensely individualistic, but of the group Dürer was by far the most fully realized as an independent creator, as we can see from the vast range and unmistakable flair of his work and, not least, because he left a substantial corpus of printed writings about art and related subjects, and a number of his highly distinctive personal letters have survived.
⁴
We see and know Dürer, and what we see and know we like. It must have been good to have in him in your house and hear him talk (and watch him draw).

Yet, individual though he was, Dürer came from an age when art was still to a considerable extent a collective occupation, taking place in workshops in which specialists performed their functions side by side, tasks were shared, and the less responsible portions were assigned according to a strict hierarchy of skills and experience. There were the
Lehring,
apprentices; the
Geselle,
trained worker-craftsmen; and the
Meister
. The number, size, and complexity of these workshops had been enormously increased in the generation or so before Dürer’s birth by the rapid increase of wealth, a feature of most parts of Europe but particularly notable on both sides of the Alps and, above all, by the industrial phenomenon of printing, especially in Germany and Italy.
⁵

Printing might be described as the mass production of images on flat surfaces, especially paper. It was the first technological revolution to accelerate the speed at which humanity hurries into the future, and almost certainly the most important because it affected every aspect of life. Printing from movable type was the work of the Mainz goldsmiths Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust in 1446–1448, twenty years before Dürer was born. By 1455 Gutenberg had completed and published the world’s first printed book, a Bible, and the importance of the event was immediately recognized. The impact on knowledge was huge because the first encyclopedia was published in 1460, soon to be followed by the first Bible in German—vernacular works formed a high proportion of the earliest books.
⁶
The salient characteristic of printing was cheapness. Before printing, owning manuscripts had been the privilege of the rich or institutions; only the largest libraries had as many as 600 books, and the total number of books in Europe as of 1450 was well under 100,000. By 1500, when Dürer was approaching his thir
ties and printing had been going for forty-five years, the total was over 9 million.
⁷

Born in Nuremberg, a highly prosperous and sophisticated south German town, notable for its skilled artisans of every kind, Dürer was at the heart of the printing revolution. The town got its first printing press in 1470, the year before he was born, and it rapidly became not merely the leading town in the German book-producing industry but the center of the international printing trade. The master printer Anton Kolberger, Dürer’s godfather, kept twenty-four presses going at top speed, employed 150 workmen, and ran a network of connections with traders and scholars throughout Europe. Dürer’s parents had been able to secure so prominent and prosperous a sponsor for their son because Dürer senior, like Gutenberg, was a goldsmith (as was Kolberger as a young man), and a successful one. The family had come from Hungary (where Dürer means “door”) but were patronized by Nuremberg’s prosperous citizens by the time Dürer was born. Goldsmithing was close to the printing trade for all kinds of technical reasons, including reproduction. Mass production of images had preceded the invention of movable type, both God and Mammon playing a part: the commonest items were religious prayer cards and playing cards. But goldsmiths also traded in mass-produced designs of the cheaper forms of jewelry. Indeed goldsmiths almost certainly invented engraving in iron and copper a generation before they invented printing. South German goldsmiths, between 1425 and 1440, impressed paper on plates engraved in their workshops to produce large numbers of examples of printed designs to help in the transfer of repeated or symmetrical elements, for training and record keeping, and for sale. All the centers of early engraving—Colmar, Strasbourg, Basel, and Constance—evolved from goldsmithing, and the first really accomplished engraver-printmaker who produced enough of his work to sign himself with his monogram “ES” (c. 1460) was a goldsmith.
⁸
By the time Dürer was born, the greatest of the early engravers, Martin Schongauer, operating from his goldsmith’s workshop in Colmar, was monogramming all his prints—a new art had been born too by 1471.
⁹

Dürer was naturally apprenticed in his father’s workshop, but
after three years he told old Dürer that he wished to specialize as a designer-artist. His father was disturbed but cannot have been surprised, given his son’s superb graphic skills. Goldsmithing was the high road to fine art in fifteenth-century Europe. Literally hundreds of German and Italian painters and sculptors were the sons (and in a few cases the daughters) of goldsmiths. Dürer, an exceptionally alert and studio-wise teenager, may actually have asked his father to apprentice him to Schongauer as an engraver, then the state-of-the-art medium in mass production. He had seen the master’s work, loved it, copied it, and revered its creator. But by the time he actually got to Colmar, Schongauer had just died. Instead, Dürer senior apprenticed his son to a Nuremberg artist, Michael Wolgemut, who specialized in woodcutting and wood engraving. This made good commercial sense, particularly in view of the family’s close connection with the printer Kotburger. The new process for engraving on metal allowed finer work—that was why a brilliant draftsman like Dürer was so keen on it. On the other hand, printing woodcuts or books with woodcut illustrations was much cheaper and was central to the rapidly expanding consumer market in books.
¹⁰

It was, moreover, woodcuts which eventually made Dürer the best-known and most loved artist in northern Europe, probably the wealthiest, and the central figure in German art up to and including our own times. Nor, as a medium, is the woodcut to be despised. Its blocks are made from well-seasoned planks, a foot thick, cut from the length of soft trees, such as beech, alder, pear, sycamore, and walnut. It is a relief printing technique in which a pen, pencil, or brush is used to draw a design (the block is often whitened by paint) that becomes the printed surface, raised above the rest of the block, which is cut away. The design is cut as follows: a sharp knife is used to make two incisions on each side of the drawn line—one incision inclines away from the line and the other toward it, so that the line is left with a conical section between two V-shaped declivities. Once these lines have been established, the surplus wood surface is removed, using chisels, scoops, and gouges, leaving a network of lines or hatchings on the remains of the surface. In practice, the cutter, if skillful, can create signs which give the impression that the print is a drawing, with cross-hatching.
The best woodcuts are not only drawn by the artist but also cut by him—though occasionally the artist forms a partnership with a particularly skillful cutter who knows his ways. Printing from woodcuts involves putting a lot of pressure on the surface of the blocks, so the lines cannot be cut too thin. This is why engraving on metal, which can take more pressure, is and has always been more precise than woodcutting.
¹¹

Wolgemut and his brilliant apprentice worked together to make the woodcut more sophisticated and sensitive, and when Dürer finished his articles in 1489, he went on his “wander years” to the Netherlands and other parts of Germany to meet expert artists and acquire knowledge and technique. His passion for improving his art was perhaps his strongest single emotion and fed his ever-expanding creative gifts. There exists in Basel an actual woodblock,
St. Jerome in His Study
, drawn and carved by Dürer, and autographed on the reverse: “Albrecht Dürer of Nüremberg.” With Wolgemut, and from 1490 in his own workshop, Dürer created several immense series of woodcuts, which his godfather published: a small-size
Passion
group, which became the equivalent of a best seller; a volume of moral tales with forty-five woodcuts by Dürer; and an immensely successful series of 116 illustrations to a
Book of Follies
(1494) by Sebastian Brant. Brant completed a translation of Terence’s comedies for which Dürer provided 126 drawings, but for some unknown reason the work was never published. What we have are the drawings on the blocks, six blocks already cut, and seven prints from blocks which have disappeared. Together they give an extraordinary insight into the work of a busy illustrator in the 1490s (the decade which saw Columbus in the Americas) working for the popular publishing industry.
¹²

Dürer’s first real masterpiece in woodcutting was his
Apocalypse
series of 1496–1498, which was followed by a number of superb individual prints including
Sampson and the Lions
and
The Knight of the Landsknecht
. He continued to produce work from wood all his life (with the help of assistants and expert cutters), and it is likely that he made more money from this source than from any other, as the print runs were often very long. From the early 1500s he began work on his
Large Woodcut Passion
—its elaboration and power and the sheer daring of its conception have never been surpassed in this
recalcitrant medium. He followed this with a magnificent series,
Life of the Virgin
; and some special work for Emperor Maximilian. The latter included a woodcut portrait (1578) that went all over Europe and became an iconic image, and an enormous triumphant arch assembled from 192 large woodcuts printed in 1517–1518. Both his
Small Passion
(three images) and his
Large Passion
(sixteen images) were published in book form, being a new kind of book—the illustrated art book. Dürer also, as a by-product of his publishing work, did presentation drawings—a
Passion
sequence (1504) of which eleven sheets have survived, in pen and black wash on green paper; and a superb ornamented page for a personal
Book of Hours
for the emperor, in red, green, and violet ink (1513), perhaps the most exquisite work in the entire history of book illustration.
¹³